5 ms·
I don’t know, at scale in a company, my mood has always been (with Windows, mostly, but sometimes older versions of macOS) that if the issue doesn’t exist on a
by easton 6y ago
I don’t know, at scale in a company, my mood has always been (with Windows, mostly, but sometimes older versions of macOS) that if the issue doesn’t exist on a clean test box, we’re reimaging your machine. Since home folders are often somewhere else (folder redirection or OneDrive in Windows, in this case on a separate volume from /System), a OS reinstall isn’t very time consuming. Once the OS comes back up, MDM grabs it and sets up policy and applications.
For personal use, most people don’t install stuff that’s that complicated to redo (maybe at most, Adobe and Office which are download pkg and sign in), so if the OS was so fundamentally borked that the sealed system volume stood in your way, you’d waste more time trying to fix it by hand rather than just reinstalling the OS from Internet Recovery and signing back in. Especially since Time Machine does a good job at backing up home folders.
- livueta 6y agoAt one of the large companies I worked for, IT took that "just pave it" approach for _everything_. Maybe because of the contrast between that and my day job of spending weeks to months root-causing really weird distributed systems issues, it stuck me as penny-wise-pound-foolish. At least in this example, that attitude was used as an excuse to never actually investigate anything, even issues that recurred within days of a re-image. Outlook won't connect? Here, go watch the installer for a couple of hours, use your device for a day or two then back to square one. Eventually, it's easy to get so sick of IT's obvious unwillingness to actually fix shit that IT is avoided unless absolutely necessary, and everyone's productivity suffers as a result. At that company, IT was at the top of the negatives column on every internal survey. It is definitely an effective attitude to take at scale, but it has to be paired with at least some troubleshooting of the class of issue. Otherwise, severe bugs get swept under the rug by user exhaustion and IT inaction.
- pxeboot 6y agoOn the opposite end of the spectrum, I worked somewhere that avoided reimaging PCs at all costs. Every system had tens of random workarounds applied to 'fix' issues as quickly as possible. Nothing was consistent, and IT also had a very poor reputation.
- mschuster91 6y agoThe effective way is to go "pave it/replace the machine" for the first time you hear an issue, but as soon as the second or third report comes in, it gets investigated.
- Akronymus 6y agoI'd personally go with re-imaging the first X times, then do a root cause analysis.